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Talk Lacewing - Cisa Seminars

How are unconscious emotions possible?

Michael Lacewing

 

Heythrop College, University of London

  

An unconscious emotion is an emotion that the subject cannot avow directly and non-inferentially. But how should we understand the possibility of such states? I shall compare some prominent theories of unconscious emotion from philosophy, psychology and psychoanalysis, to test the viability of their accounts. I shall argue that a distinctly psychodynamic conception of unconscious emotion is both necessary and cogent, but leave open the precise form that such a theory should take. The paper as a whole seeks to provide an example of the fruitfulness of interdisciplinary work in the philosophy of emotion, and urges the inclusion of psychoanalytic conceptions of the mind in that dialogue.

 

Poster